Belkin’s streamer demeanours deserving of birching

Belkin’s @TV television streamer allows you to watch your favourite shows in near real time, anywhere.

John Davidson

Is there such a thing as a hanging offence when it comes to gadgets?

If there is, who, precisely, would you hang? The chief executive of the company that made the gadget? The vice-president who signed off on it? The engineer? The market researcher who thought it would be a good idea in the first place?

I ask these questions because it appears Belkin has committed a few serious breaches of the Excellent Gadget Act (EGA) with its @TV television streamer, a quite decent and useful device that would be very decent and very useful if not for those breaches. They may not be capital offences but they certainly warrant a strong spanking, and quite possibly a stroke or two of the rattan cane.

Belkin’s @TV is small black box that sits between your Foxtel or TiVo or PVR (or whatever set-top box you have, subject to the caveats below) and your TV. The box intercepts the video signal coming from the set-top box, compresses it and streams the compressed version over your home network and/or the internet. An app running on your iPad, iPhone, Android device, Windows PC or Mac can then tune into that stream, allowing you to watch your shows in near real time, wherever you are.

You could be in the dunny during the crucial part of a footy match. You could be overseas, desperate to catch your weekly instalment of Offspring. Wherever you are, @TV allows you to watch what’s playing in your lounge room, with pretty good sound and a picture that, though far from perfect, is much better than that dreadful sensation of not being able to watch at all. (Catch-up TV services are often blocked from overseas, remember.)

You can even get the @TV box to send out infrared signals to the set-top box, turning it on and off, changing channels and starting and stopping pre-recorded shows.

It all works well enough, but it’s held back by the aforementioned flaws. The main breach of the EGA is an egregious contravention of the Connectivity section, paragraph 5, which states that all television-related devices released after 2009 must, wherever possible, use HDMI to connect to other devices. @TV has no HDMI input or output, but offers you a choice of either composite or component inputs and outputs (remember them?).

That rules out @TV’s use with newer, HDMI-only devices and on some older devices that offer you a choice of either component and HDMI output (but not both at once), it will force you to revert to component cabling. (Some devices, of course, allow component and HDMI at the same time, and on those devices @TV’s lack of HDMI won’t be such a big deal. You’ll be able to keep your TV attached to your device using the HDMI cable, and you can just hang the @TV off the side using the component cables.

In any event, it’s been several years since we’ve used the component interface on anything here in the Labs, and so we were forced to dig out an old TiVo box just to perform our review.

Note the component plugs and the ethernet. Note the abject lack of HDMI.

Just who deserves to be spanked/caned/hanged for this glaring breach is hard to say. It’s likely that the anti-copying technology built into the HDMI standard precludes the use of HDMI for streaming devices like the @TV, meaning that it’s the HDMI consortium, and ultimately Hollywood, that deserves the punishment. (I would happily volunteer to bend Kristen Stewart over my knee, as a proxy for Hollywood, but I fear the blame may lie much higher up the Hollywood chain.)

Once we got over our shock about the lack of HDMI, and the ensuing shock of having to use the decrepit TiVo interface again, @TV was actually pretty good. It took about 30 minutes to set up: first we hooked it up between the TiVo box and the TV; then we plugged it into an ethernet port on our network (you can also use Wi-Fi but, alas, not for the set-up process); and lastly we ran some Belkin software on a PC on the same network, which configured the @TV with a user name and password, and opened a hole in our router’s firewall so the video stream could be accessed from the internet.

After that, it was simply a matter of installing the free @TV app on our iPad, putting in that user name and password, and watching the TiVo on the iPad’s screen. (Android and iPhone apps are available, but they cost $13.99 each, so of course we didn’t test them.)

With the iPad connected via Wi-Fi to the same network as the @TV box (which it would be, say, if you were watching TV from the dunny), the picture quality was a little blurry and the picture would hiccup from time to time, but it was certainly watchable. Using a little on-screen remote control, which you can call up on your viewing device, we were able to send basic commands to the TiVo, starting videos, changing channels on live TV and scrolling through the TiVo’s menus with little trouble at all.

There is a bit of a lag (roughly four seconds) between pressing a button on the remote control and seeing the result on the screen, making menu navigation a little tedious, but it wasn’t difficult. More difficult was using the TiVo when it required specialised buttons, such the Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons: such buttons appear on the PC version of the viewing app, but not (as far as we could find) on the iPad version, making it impossible to reboot remotely the TiVo from an iPad, for instance.

Speaking of remote controls, it’s there that we found the other big breach of the EGA. @TV supposedly comes with its own electronic program guide (EPG), allowing you to program recordings without the tiresome scroll through your PVR’s on-screen guide, but sadly, there is no EPG for Australia, contravening both the Deliver What You Promise section of the EGA, and the Don’t Discriminate Against Countries That Aren’t America section.

Anyway, the story was exactly the same when we accessed our TiVo from a Wi-Fi network across the city: the picture quality was perfectly watchable though not great, and there was that same four-second lag in the remote control. It’s worth noting that accessing the @TV remotely like that consumed about 135 kilobytes per second of bandwidth, which translates to roughly 460 megabytes of data an hour: something which might prove costly if you use your @TV a lot.

And if you’re with the wrong ISP, you could get double-billed for that, too: once by your home ISP for the upload, and once by the remote ISP for the download.

Which brings me to using @TV over a mobile data connection. We tested the system using the iPad’s HSDPA connection on the Telstra network, and there, too, we got surprisingly watchable results. The picture was far more blurred and had much more stuttering than when the signal was carried over Wi-Fi, but it was still much better than nothing.

Of course, watching TV like that would cost a pretty penny: roaming overseas could cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars per hour of TV. In most households, that certainly would be a hanging offence.

Twitter:@DLLabs

The Australian Financial Review

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.